Yes! and, said our hostess, they were making it like a garden! It had
been long neglected and become disgracefully overgrown with weeds and
bushes, but now they were trimming it up in fine style. They were
cemetery experts from Batavia way, and the job was to cost sixteen
hundred dollars. But it was worth it, for indeed they were making it look
like a garden!

Presently we stepped over to the churchyard. We should not have been
human if we had not advanced with a Hamlet-Horatio air: "Has this fellow
no feeling of his business, that he sings at grave-making?" We found our
four friends in a space of the churchyard from which the tombstones had
been temporarily removed, engaged, not with mattock and death's head, but
with spirit-level and measuring-cord. They were levelling a stretch of
newly-turned and smoothed ground, and they pointed with pride to the
portion of the work already accomplished, serried rows of spick-and-span
headstones, all "plumb," as they explained, and freshly scraped--not a
sign of caressing moss or a tendril of vine to be seen. A neat job, if
there ever was one. We should have seen the yard before they had taken it
in hand! There wasn't a stone that was straight, and the weeds and the
brambles--well, look at it now. We looked. Could anything be more refined
or in more perfect taste? The churchyard was as smooth and correct as a
newly-barbered head, not a hair out of place. We looked and kept our
thoughts to ourselves, but we wondered if the dead were really as
grateful as they should be for this drastic house-cleaning? Did they
appreciate this mathematical uniformity, this spruce and spotless
residential air of their numbered rectangular rest; or was not the old
way nearer to their desire, with soft mosses tucking them in from the
garish sun, and Spring winds spreading coverlets of wild flowers above
their sleep?